Keskustelujen arkisto

Fredrik Ekman, about getting Scandinavian characters into the index:

> Well, perhaps it was stupid of me to suggest Latin-1. There is absolutely
> no realistic way to use it for plain-text files over the 'net. The only
> way is to UUencode it. This could work, but it also means that all
> indexers will have to know a lot about what they are doing. They must
> know enough about Latin-1 to tell if that is what they are using (or else
> a way of converting it) and also be able to UUencode. But I really don't
> see another way to have Swedish, Danish and other non-English titles in
> the database. Perhaps every language could use their own 7-bit standard,
> but that would be messy for anyone interested in some other country's
> titles...

Is it really worth this effort just to be able to see those neat, dotted
characters? I don't think so.

As it is now, those three letters have been replaced by a, a and o res-
pectivally; it's pure 7-bit. This might of course occasionally lead to am-
biguous titles, but OTOH it is simple and -- more important -- it always
works.

It is probable that a more complicated technical solution might deter the
folks who do the actual indexing. Simplicity is a virtue here.

Anders Engwall Email: Anders.Engwall at eua.ericsson.se
ELLEMTEL Utvecklings AB Voice: +46 8 727 3893
[lvsj|, Sweden Fax: +46 8 727 42 20
endremin saxassa flumen flobollala / feilobasch falljada follidi / flumbasch

DWIGHT:

You do realize you'll be passing through my neck of the woods?! As you
might know, my hometown Lund is 15 km (exactly 13 minutes by local train) north
of Malmo -- so if you want to get in touch while in the Copenhagen/Malmo area,
jes' lemme know! Oh -- and I *don't* think "Masterdetektiven Basil Mus" is
available in Swedish any longer, though I might be wrong on that'n...

All my best

Mattias

**** Mattias Hallin ** Lund * Sweden ** <Mattias.Hallin at jurenh.lu.se> ****
* *
* "Oh bury me thar! With my battered git-tar! *
************** A-screamin' my heart out fer yew!" *************

>
> On with my point. Two of my more favorite minor characters are Peg-Leg
> Pete and Horace Horsecollar (don't ask me why - I don't know) But I have
> never seen any mention of them here. Do you use them very much? or at
> all? What are names over there? Just thought I'd ask.
>
Well, even in the States, Pete has gone through an evolution. Since a
handdicapped villain would be thought to imply that all handicapped people
are villains, Pegleg Pete long since grew his leg back. No more jokes like
the one I saw recently in a '30s Mickey Mouse cartoon ("Mickey's Service
Station"), in which a fancily dressed Pete is shown wearing spats: a
regular-sized spatterdash on his one shoe, and a miniature spat on his
peg-leg. He later became Black Pete, but supposedly the use of the word
"black" became problematic, so then he was Sneaky Pete...until somebody
realized sneaky pete is a kind of alcoholic drink. More recently he was
Big Bad Pete...and for all I know, he's just Pete now.

Speaking of peg-legs, I just translated a long Dutch story for Gladstone
in which Donald dresses up like a pirate, even to putting on a peg-leg.
THERE IS NO POSSIBLE PLACE TO PUT HIS REAL LEG AND FOOT! Yet he's shown
wearing a peg-leg as if his real leg and foot are missing! Weird...surreal...
(and one of the nephews is shown wearing an earring...with no ear to
attach it to).

As for Horace Horsecollar, I always thought the German name for him was
inspired. The German word for "horse" is "Pferd," so his name in German
became "Pferdinand." Incidentally, I've seen a Horace Horsecollar PVC
figure on sale in some toy stores, modeled in the '30s style. Nifty!

--Dwight Decker

(just a Mickey Mouse translator)

Dear Folks,

A few things to comment on, today.

First, Dwight Decker said that Horace's name in German was
Pferdinand. Where have you seen this? His name in German COMICS is
Rudi Ross, and if the PVC figurine said "Pferdinand" it's because
whoever wrote the name on it didn't know who this character was! (I
think Pferdinand is a better name for him, but like it or not, I've
never seen it.)

I have also never seen any material in which Pete was named
"Sneaky Pete," but I'll take your word for it. As a young boy, I loved
the Mickey stories in the "big white books" which were then on sale, but
I *hated* the Mickey stories I was then finding in Whitman comics. I
couldn't understand why Whitman didn't make Mickey stories that were as
good as Donald stories, like the ones in the big white books were...

Pete also appeared in the Alice and Oswald cartoons before
settling down as Mickey's nemesis. In those, he was sometimes called
Pegleg Pete, but more often Putrid Pete. According to a source at
Disney, when it was time to come up with a new name to replace Black
Pete, they almost went for Putrid Pete again, but then decided that
little kids wouldn't understand the word 'putrid.' Feh. I thought
Disney comics were *supposed* to teach kids things -- I learned the word
"bouillabaisse" from a Barks story. (Although I may still not have
learnt how to SPELL it from memory...)

MARK: Egmont has been publishing a mixture of Mickey stories for
years and years; some VERY bad, some a little better, and only once in
a blue moon (as far as I can figure) one that's pretty darned good. The
artist chosen never seems to have any relation to what the editors think
of the script, until recently, when the better scripts seem to
consistently go to Ferioli and -- although we've only seen the hypnotism
story as yet -- Noel Van Horn.
About a year ago a drive began to revitalize Mickey. Model sheets
and character analyses were prepared for many old Gottfredson
characters, and writers were encouraged to recapture Mickey's
personality c. 1936. We're now seeing the results of that -- I've seen
some pretty darned good Mickey stories of late, even though there have
been some clinkers as well.
Egmont has been trying to get the complete FG strip in English (as
you know, Geir -- if you're reading this that is!). When they do, a
more complete "Mickey bible" will be compiled, the goal being to bring
Mickey's world back to how it should be once and for all!

I'd like to have my stories illustrated by Ferioli, but I'll wait
til I get to do an adventure story (and I'm going to do one next year,
with Sylvester Shyster). For now, my Mickey gag stories are planned to
be drawn by Noel Van Horn, and I'm pleased as punch.

JOEL: Glad to hear from you! You'll be glad to know that when
the "Mickey bible" is compiled, Horace will return to his mid-'30s
position as one of Mickey's closest chums. As it is, I've only seen a
very small handful of foreign stories that give poor Horace much to do
at all. But that is going to change. My first MM story for Egmont
involves Mickey and Horace travelling to Mount Fishflake to prospect for
a rare mineral which I named "amaturnite". I like to use Horace with
Mickey because he's smarter than Goofy, and the two can trade
good-natured barbs and are more on a level with one another mentally.

MM: "Just think o' the swell view of that canyon we had, Horace!"
Horace: "I don't *wanna* think about it! I nearly got a *closer*
view than I wanted!"
MM: "Yeah, a shame, ain't it? Y' gotta learn how to climb
*before* ya tackle a mountain!"
Horace: ">Snort< Aw, dry up! I just shoulda watched where I put
my left foot, y' see?"
MM: "Sure thing! Only it's hard to keep track of *one* left foot
when y' got *two* of 'em!"

... And so forth.

This week's British MM contains the first part of the Prof.
Dustibones MM story "Fossil Hunters" (D93323), and it sure is great.
Really Gottfredsonian -- and Marx Bros. fans will get a thrill as
Dustibones' rival is named Prof. Wagstaff of Huxley College... The
issue also has two Madam Mim one-pagers (D90238 and D93092), a
Scalabroni Scrooge two-pager (H89139), and a Donald one-pager (D93117).
And of course, Van Horn's meteor story (D93490), with Donald vs. Pegleg
Pete. Pete, as usual in DD stories, uses a silly alias -- in this case,
Woimly Filcher. But his dialect, personality and (of course) appearance
are obvious as always.

I'll be back, folks!

David Gerstein

Anders.Engwall wrote:
As it is now, those three letters have been replaced by a, a and o res-
pectivally; it's pure 7-bit.
Shouldn't this be aa ae and oe. At least that is the English version of the
last three letters in the Norwegian language.

-Dag Nummedal

Hello, I've been lurking on this list for a couple of months now.

I'm an Anglo-Dane living in Germany, and though I never lived
in Denmark, some generous Danish friends of ours always used to
send their Anders And & Co and Ekstra-Hafte to us, so I grew up
reading lots of Donald Duck. I still have a most of the weeklies
from 1976 to 1984, and a few from before that.

When I first saw Donald Duck in England I was quite disturbed to
see him speaking English! I had always known that DD came from
America, but somehow I had got so used to everyone in the comics
speaking perfect Danish. Now, reading this list, I hear that
Pegleg Pete has a very characteristic accent, and that the
same goes for Brer Rabbit, and early Mickey Mouse. And Huey, Dewey
and Louie call Scrooge 'Unca', whereas in Danish they use the normal
word for Uncle! Seems like we're missing out in Europe. Even Dr.
Erika Fuchs, who's translations of Barks are (rightly) held in very
high regard here chose to make everyone speak High German. I guess
some things are just too hard to translate.

I love the idea of having the "square" people speaking Nynorsk.
This, to me, gives exactly the right bizarre touch to them, but
maybe Norwegians don't find Nynorsk bizarre...

Btw., Pegleg Pete is still called Sorteper in Denmark, even though it
means Black Pete. (Note, whoever maintains the interlingual file, that
it is one word, at least I have never seen it as two.)

--
Erik Corry, Freiburg, Germany, +49 761 406637 erik at kroete2.freinet.de

Dear Folks,

First thing to discuss today are the foreign names of some
characters. I have learnt that before the Nazis banned Disney
characters, Donald had the name Schnatterich. I mentioned that a few
months ago. What I DIDN'T know, was that this was only his name in
COMICS. In a storybook based on "The Wise Little Hen," Donald was
named Emmerich, and the name was used in a few other places too.
What a mess. So Donald had TWO names in Germany before World War II.
A similar situation seems to be behind the use of the name
Pferdinand for Horace. In a letter to me, Dwight confirmed that this
was his name in a STORYBOOK, suggesting that once again, it was a
case of a translator who knew nothing about comics working with the
characters in a different medium... Groan.

How characters work together
=== ========== ==== ========
As far as I'm concerned, Horace and Goofy would be great
together if used right. They would work very much like Laurel
and Hardy, in fact. Like Oliver Hardy, Horace thinks he knows how to
do absolutely everything (referring to his "Horsecollar Touch" in a
few of the 1930s stories!), and is good at bossing others around, but
in fact causes himself lots of accidents. You don't see Horace
bossing Mickey around, but he sure gives it to Goofy and Clarabelle
both in the mid-'30s. And Clarabelle never listens to him,
naturally. Why doesn't Horace boss Mickey around? Because Mickey's
the one guy who (to Horace) seems to know how to do everything.
Of course, Mickey DOESN'T know how to do everything (something some
writers forget), and his real tragic flaw is his eternal enthusiasm and
curiosity.

Mau Heymans goes to the dogs (and cats)
=== ======= ==== == === ==== ==== =====
A few weeks ago there was a really WEIRD Dutch story in the
Danish AA & Co. There was a radio contest for people to do
the best animal imitations, and Donald and Jones both decided to
enter. It just looked too weird to see Donald up on stage imitating
a cat, I'm sorry. And then there were the scenes of Donald and Jones
up late at night on the back fence, yowling and barking at one
another. I just couldn't really believe that they would take their
animal imitations so seriously. And while the pair did this, we cut
briefly to Bolivar and a cat complaining about the noise. I imagine
Bolivar should have had a thought-balloon, but instead he was just
talking with a word balloon -- what a shock!

Dialect and Magica De Spell
======= === ====== == =====
On the subject of DIALECT, Zeke Wolf also speaks in it.
Definitely an "uneducated" type of dialect, although not quite as
backwoods-sounding as Br'er Rabbit's speech. And some people write
Magica de Spell talking in dialect, too -- they drop every "the" from
her speech (i. e. "Give me dime, Scrooge!") as if she doesn't know
English that well. I think that this stems from DuckTales, where
Magica spoke with a very thick accent that sounded both Italian and
sort of Slavic, too. What bothers me, though, is that I have
also seen a few stories in which SCROOGE was written in dialect -- I
really don't go for that. They tried to make him sound Scottish.
The best example is the story in US 257, "Coffee, Louie, or Me?" The
dialect sounds as piratical as it does Scottish, and besides, I never
thought Scrooge's dialect was supposed to be strong enough that it
affected his speech, save an occasional use of "lads".

Upcoming Gladstones in January
======== ========== == =======
From Diamond Previews for this month:
DDA 31 has as its cover Carl Barks' JW adventure "Traitor in
the Ranks" as redrawn by Daan Jippes, with a MAGNIFICENT cover
(perhaps by Pat Block). Backup feature is Ben Verhagen's "A Car-Gone
Conclusion". Donald has taken up work at a used-car shop in deserted
Pizen Bluff; he would like to impress Uncle Scrooge by making good
at this miserable job, and ultimately does (only I'm not telling you
how). I wrote the English for this Dutch story.
WDC&S 596 has William Van Horn's "The Terror of Duckburg" and
part four of "Monarch of Medioka." Just what is "The Terror of
Duckburg" about?
US 291 has Rosa's "Dreamtime Duck of the Never Never," a truly
great story of Scrooge in Australia, if the German version's anything
to go by. Some absolutely great scenes as Scrooge deals with (it
looks like) another McViper, as well as an aboriginal seer who looks
deep into his future. And (although Previews didn't note it) I've been
told that the backup is Vicar's "A Case of Too Much Money," another
for which I wrote the English. Scrooge is trying to rid himself of
valueless Castrovian Rubleniks, but the elements seem to conspire
against him.
You'll notice that my dialogs are beginning to appear in
greater numbers now. This should continue through mid-'96! After they
print these two, there are at least eleven of my foreign dialogs
Gladstone has yet to print -- and that doesn't count parts 2-3 of
the Scarpa lentil story in USA 31-32, or an original Egmont story of
mine which should appear in USA 34. Some of these dialogs were done
as early as 1990, so the quality may fluctuate a bit, as I like to
think that I've gained experience and quality with time! (Boy, I
HOPE so.) I still kick myself when I look at some of my earlier work
-- I ALWAYS see something I coulda done a LOT better.

I'll be back sooner or later, folks. All the best,

David Gerstein
<9475609 at arran.sms.ed.ac.uk>